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WOW2 - April 2023: Women Trailblazers and Activists, 4-1 thru 4-8 [1]

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Date: 2023-04-01

April 8, 1857 – Fanny Lucy Radmall Houston born, Lady Lucy Houston, British suffragette, political activist, and philanthropist. She was the ninth of ten children born to a warehouseman. She became a chorus girl known as Poppy, and at age 16, mistress of a man twice her age who came from a family of wealthy brewery owners. After 10 years, he died, and left her £6,000 per year in his will, much to the disgust of his family. She then married the son of a baronet, but it ended in divorce. Her second husband was George Byron, 9th Baron Byron. As Lady Byron, she was an active suffragette who used her wealth to support the cause and stood bail for Emmeline Pankhurst. During WWI, she sent matches and socks to British soldiers, and started Bluebirds’ Nest, a rest home for nurses who served on the Western Front, for which she was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire. Her husband died in 1917. She next set her sights on Sir Robert Houston, 1st Baronet and Member of Parliament. He was a confirmed bachelor, and his old friend, F.E. Smith, the Earl of Birkenhead, opposed the marriage, but Lady Lucy and Sir Robert were married in 1924. When he died in 1926, he left her £5.5 million, making her the second wealthiest woman in England. Although not liable to pay death duties on Houston's estate she negotiated personally with Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, to pay £1.6m without admitting liability. After the British government refused to allow RAF involvement in the air race for the Schneider Trophy in 1931, she donated £100,000 to Supermarine, allowing them to win the trophy that year. Without her impulsive generosity in 1931, the Supermarine Spitfire would probably not have been developed in time to help defeat the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain in 1940, then go on to fly in countless air battles over Europe, the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and South-East Asia. In 1932, she offered to give £200,000 to strengthen the British Armed Forces. The National Government refused. She sent a telegram to Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald: “ I alone have dared to point out the dire need for air defence of London. You have muzzled others who have deplored this shameful neglect. You have treated my patriotic gesture with a contempt such as no other government would have been guilty of toward a patriot.” In 1933 she financed the Houston-Mount Everest flight expedition, in which aircraft flew over the summit of Mount Everest for the first time. Following her purchase of the Saturday Review in 1933 at the age of 76, she threw herself into a frenzy of work as a newspaper proprietor, determined to alert Britain to the weakness of its political leaders and the dangers of communist infiltration of Britain. She detested Ramsey MacDonald and his successor Stanley Baldwin, and promoted Winston Churchill as the next Prime Minister, but had become so paranoid about communism that she considered the Soviet Union a greater threat to the British Empire than Hitler or Mussolini. By this time, she was a semi-invalid, and edited and ran the Saturday Review from bed. She died of a heart attack in 1936. She had no children and left no will.

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